The compective community vs the casual side

Games Other Halo
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The past few month the compective community has been going hard on trying to make the game only playable for them selves and they are not caring about the other 50% of the community that is playing IS, BTB and so on. They don’t want ricochet to be part of the v5 settings cause they think its only for casuals and it can’t be a good gametype. A few pros ([CLASSIFIED]for a example)Has trashed the casual community for the passed few days (The round table discussion that he did). If it wasn’t for the casual community the compective community would of never been thought of during the first few halos.

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YES YES YES YES YES YES etc!

FINALLY a thread with the word ‘competitive’ in it that DOESN’T start with somebody telling casual players that THEY ruined halo… what REALLY ruined halo is time… its not longer something the mass market wants (they want COD), so 343i tried to appeal to the mass market… and failed…

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Delta I made this thread cause I’m sick and tired of the competitive crowd trying to shove their playlist down the normal community throats.

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> Delta I made this thread cause I’m sick and tired of the competitive crowd trying to shove their playlist down the normal community throats.

I hear ya! im a pretty lax multi-team player who just plays for the chaos… and all i hear is balance this balance that… can’t i just shoot somebody? really… does EVERY fight have to play like they want it?

for example loadouts, i love those… mean if i want an AR, i can haz, if i want a BR, i can haz… if i’m feeling crazy, i can haz suppressor…

but the ‘competitive’ people would rather EVERYTHING start with a BR… and to that i say, please no… i like mah loadout system…

just an example of my disagreement with the competitive people…

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I am unaware of this “making the game only playable for themselves” and “shoving their playlist down the normal community’s throats.” Could you enlighten me?

Also, it was announced in yesterday’s Halo Bulletin that they’re testing Ricochet for the v5 competitive gametypes.

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Vek what it is that they want everone who plays the game to use the BR only.

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> I am unaware of this “making the game only playable for themselves” and “shoving their playlist down the normal community’s throats.” Could you enlighten me?
>
> Also, it was announced in yesterday’s Halo Bulletin that they’re testing Ricochet for the v5 competitive game-types.

What he means is, once they announced the v5 ricochet, some competitive players starting whining that its a ‘casual’ game-type and it doesn’t belong in competitive halo… which is silly, its plenty competitive if you ask me…

also, i’d like to say that im aware not all competitive players want to set anything that halo: reach or halo 4 brought to the sandbox on fire, but there are plently of people who do seem to want to kill creativity at the cost of fun… not everybody, but i’d rather have a fun game than a ‘competitive’ game that was so predictable and repetitive that it made me cry…

i’m not saying i’m anti-competitive, im saying im not for the idea of all out removing load outs, ordnance, AAs etc.

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> The past few month the compective community has been going hard on trying to make the game only playable for them selves and they are not caring about the other 50% of the community that is playing IS, BTB and so on. They don’t want ricochet to be part of the v5 settings cause they think its only for casuals and it can’t be a good gametype. A few pros (ryannoob for a example)Has trashed the casual community for the passed few days (The round table discussion that he did). .

What makes you think they don’t care about you? They just don’t want 343 blatantly favoring casuals and forsaken the competitive community.

When H4 was released, the introduced several mechanics designed for the casual community, many taken straight from the CoD playbook. What did the competitive community get with H4? I honestly can’t see anything.

The truth is that it is the casual community which doesn’t care about the competitive community, and you’re using your weight (Numbers) to get what you want. There is no reason why there can’t be a Casual/Competitive split like there was in H3 where both sides can be happy, but currently the only ones being taken care of are the casuals.

Do you honestly not see how the overwhelming amount of changes made from previous titles to H4 favors the casual community and completely disregards the competitive one?

This isn’t a zero sum game, where in order for one side to win, the other has to lose. Both groups can be satisfied, yet 343 only cares for casuals.

The damage to the series isn’t because casuals aren’t being taken care of, because again most of the additions were with you guys in mind, the damage is neglecting the competitive community in favor of adding in gimmicks.

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BWO Arbiter

I understand all your points, but you also have to take into account, some ‘competitive’ gamers were less than polite or kind about their approach to getting competitive halo to be a bigger part of H4 (not everyone).

but it works like this: some ‘casuals’ blatantly slander the competitive, and some ‘competitive’ blatantly slander the casual… its pretty lose-lost basis really considering in-fighting gets the halo community nothing…

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I think you guys need to see this from the competitive perspective. For a long time now, Halo 4 has been mostly for the casual audience with little to offer for people who want a more competitive/traditional atmosphere. Thus far, 343’s efforts have been hit and miss, but I hear Legendary settings are OK.

Now as for some pros bashing the integration of Ricochet because it is too casual, well I can’t say I agree, mostly because I like Ricochet. With a little work I think it could work. But, I have to see the perspective of the pros as well. They, along with a lot of other fans, would prefer a gametype/playlist with settings that don’t have a lot of randomness thrown in. It is hard to have an competitive game when Ordinance, Tactical Packages, Support Upgrades, and Armor Abilities make a mess of things. In previous games, you might have only two shots with the Rockets or four shots with the Laser, so you had to make them count. Now, with Ammo, they get more of their starting ammo ALONG with Ordinance they pick up. I don’t think it necessarily fair someone arbitrarily gets more ammo with their power weapons than everyone else.

Instead of calling it “crying” and “whining”, see it in a different light.

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> I think you guys need to see this from the competitive perspective. For a long time now, Halo 4 has been mostly for the casual audience with little to offer for people who want a more competitive/traditional atmosphere. Thus far, 343’s efforts have been hit and miss, but I hear Legendary settings are OK.
>
> Now as for some pros bashing the integration of Ricochet because it is too casual, well I can’t say I agree, mostly because I like Ricochet. With a little work I think it could work. But, I have to see the perspective of the pros as well. They, along with a lot of other fans, would prefer a gametype/playlist with settings that don’t have a lot of randomness thrown in. It is hard to have an competitive game when Ordinance, Tactical Packages, Support Upgrades, and Armor Abilities make a mess of things. In previous games, you might have only two shots with the Rockets or four shots with the Laser, so you had to make them count. Now, with Ammo, they get more of their starting ammo ALONG with Ordinance they pick up. I don’t think it necessarily fair someone arbitrarily gets more ammo with their power weapons than everyone else.
>
> Instead of calling it “crying” and “whining”, see it in a different light.

Well they aren’t “Arbitrarily” getting more ammo, it is because they chose the Ammo perk, while the other player chose to use something else.

Aside from having to wait until a certain SR to unlock it, it is mostly fair in that the other players also have the opportunity to use it, they just choose not to.

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I’m not a competitive player so the only bias is the fact I don’t like the Infinity settings.

> The past few month the compective community has been going hard on trying to make the game only playable for them selves and they are not caring about the other 50% of the community that is playing IS, BTB and so on.

Not true. Since release the majority of the community (casuals and competitive players) have been trying to improve the game. Improving it so it plays like Halo not this random infinity crap. 343 are catering to the whole community. They have not removed IS or Ordnance, but instead made alternatives and continued to update the playlists they are in.

> They don’t want ricochet to be part of the v5 settings cause they think its only for casuals and it can’t be a good gametype

I believe the throwing mechanic is essentially the problem.

> A few pros (ryannoob for a example)Has trashed the casual community for the passed few days (The round table discussion that he did)

He makes a living by playing games. I am not bashing every pro but allot of them seem to have no grasp on reality nor care for others. Take no notice of it.

> If it wasn’t for the casual community the compective community would of never been thought of during the first few halos.

That doesn’t mean that 343 should forget their existence.

To sum up, 343 are doing a great job of improving the game. I do agree to some extent that they are catering towards the competitive community but I disagree with the fact that you think they are ignoring the casual community because that is far from true. You may like all the Infinity crap, but you are not speaking for all players (casual and competitive). The game at launch was built around the extremely casual gamer, so its only fair the competitive community see some love.

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> its not longer something the mass market wants (they want COD), so 343i tried to appeal to the mass market… and failed…

“Mass market” and “casual gamers” are more or less synonymous in this case. The mass market consists of casual gamers who will play a game for relatively little time before moving on to the next one, hence “casual”. They don’t really invest themselves in a specific game; they just play what’s new and what everyone else is playing. Because 343 tried to appeal to these players, the game has not done as well as previous installments where Halo didn’t deviate far from its original formula. When you try to casualize the game to match competition like CoD, there’s no incentive to keep playing when you can just play CoD wholesale. The problem with Halo 4 is that it doesn’t know what it’s trying to be. It’s an awkward balance between traditional Halo and Call of Duty, as per attempts to appeal to the mass market like you said. The result is that people decide to drop H4 in lieu of something more niche- CoD. That’s why its numbers have stayed as strong as they have.

Call of Duty is only 2 years younger and still keeps a respectable population, why? Because it has stayed true to its roots. Notice how Halo began its decay around the 10 year mark with Reach. That’s because Bungie began to mess with the core gameplay, and its fanbase took notice. The gameplay has continued to change or “evolve” as the supports like to sugarcoat it. It’s no coincidence that the post-release population has begun a trend of decreasing more drastically over less time as the game changes more and more.

Conversely, look at CoD. 10 years into it, it’s still going strong despite having way more titles out on the market. Again, this is because it kept to its roots. It has changed very little in core gameplay mechanics. It recognized the market niche it filled as a casual gamer pleaser, and there is nothing wrong with that. What niche does Halo fill now? Granted, Halo had a generally smaller audience than CoD, but it never failed to keep a strong population until the next installment before the core gameplay began to see drastic changes. Again, as you said, this was done in order to appeal to the Call of Duty crowd, or the “mass market” which I have already explained is synonymous with “casual”.

All that being said, did casual players ruin Halo? Hell no. Regardless of whatever ideas the casual community may suggest, in the end, it is the developer (Bungie and 343) who is ultimately responsible for what happens to the game. So the developers are slowly degrading Halo; not the casual players, how ever much I may disagree with their ideas. Of course, the game is degrading because the game is being “casualized” to compete with CoD (something that doesn’t need to be done, as they are both niche games that should not infringe on one another’s territory because the current state of Halo is the result), but that is on the developers.

I personally do not know of anybody who stopped playing Halo because it is boring as you have suggested. Maybe you do, but everyone I know of who does not play Halo anymore does so because they feel that the new installments do not feel like Halo. Now, you can say that they are more than welcome to play previous Halo games, but the only options now are Halo 3 and Reach. 3 is a netcoding nightmare, but awesome on LAN. Unfortunately, Halo 3 isn’t the new game and so nobody holds LAN competitions anymore nor do they really play online besides foreigners who are awful to play with due to connection issues. Halo: Reach was a sub-par Halo game even post-TU which marked the beginning of the decline, so few people want to play that either.

So really, the reason that Halo is “dying” is not because Halo is getting boring. It’s dying because the developers are choosing to cater the game to the casual mass-market in order to sell more copies. Of course, it works in the short run. They make a retail killing. However, the watered-down Halo gameplay ultimately steers players away mere months after its release because Halo no longer fills its niche in the shooter market. So in a way, the casuals can be blamed for the current state of Halo. It’s not fair to do so, though, because it’s really the developer’s fault for creating a short-sighted game.

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-.- The competitive community since halo 3 has been trying to remove and destroy the casual players who have stayed and played the game they don’t like casuals they want halo to be only about them and not about about the other 50%.

Now this thread is turning into the a hating on the casuals and having the competitive crowd shove their boot in our faces -.-

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> -.- The competitive community since halo 3 has been trying to remove and destroy the casual players who have stayed and played the game they don’t like casuals they want halo to be only about them and not about about the other 50%.
>
> Now this thread is turning into the a hating on the casuals and having the competitive crowd shove their boot in our faces -.-

Yeah that must be it. I think you are ever so slightly exaggerating.

The second sentence is ridicules. As said I am not a competitive player yet couldn’t disagree with you more.

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*Original post. Click at your own discretion.

> -.- The competitive community since halo 3 has been trying to remove and destroy the casual players who have stayed and played the game they don’t like casuals they want halo to be only about them and not about about the other 50%.
>
> Now this thread is turning into the a hating on the casuals and having the competitive crowd shove their boot in our faces -.-

So by not wanting a gametype in a COMPETITIVE playlist, they’re trying to remove and destroy the casual players from all of Halo then? Casual players like you (I’m assuming you since you created this thread) are just going to have to get it through their thick skulls that SOME things work great in casual gameplay, but just do NOT belong in competitive gameplay. They’re not taking away your toys to insult you, they’re taking them away so that the competitive playlist can actually do what it is supposed to do, which is be competitive.

They don’t want NON competitive elements in a competitive playlist, it’s that simple, stop making it out to be some witch-hunt.

Also stop saying 50%, you have no grounds to make the assertion that half of the community is casual, and half is competitive. I could easily make the assertion that 90% of the community is competitive, and that’s why they left after only a month of H4. Let’s not resort to making up statistics to prove our point.

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> Now this thread is turning into the a hating on the casuals and having the competitive crowd shove their boot in our faces -.-

Would you kindly stop trying to play the helpless victim? I read this entire thread and I don’t see anybody “hating” on casuals. I see people respectfully disagreeing with your post, in which you attempted to antagonize competitive players right out of the gate by insulting them, by the way.

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> -.- The competitive community since halo 3 has been trying to remove and destroy the casual players who have stayed and played the game they don’t like casuals they want halo to be only about them and not about about the other 50%.

You still haven’t explained why you think this. I can’t think of any changes to the game that have made it more difficult for Infinity fans to play (except for DLC-required Infinity Slayer, though that has nothing to do with competitive vs. casual). You talk as if Infinity settings have been stripped from every playlist in matchmaking.

As far as I can tell, you just don’t like that other people don’t like Infinity/Halo 4. What’s wrong with some people having different preferences?

If I am wrong, please tell me. I’m trying to understand why you think competitive players themselves have made Halo not fun for you.

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Although I will agree that the competitive community has been very vocal about the way MM should be set up, I have to respectively disagree that they are the ones that shoved their wishes down our throats. Only 343i has the ability to change anything. THEY decided what changes we all have to live with.

343i clearly has an agenda to make Halo a competitive game suitable for online tournaments. The bone they threw out to the casual community was SPARTAN Ops. When you compare the visible effort that has gone into tournament events, such as the agreement with -Yoink!- Gaming and now with AGL, to the lack of further support for SPARTAN Ops (not to mention Custom Games and Forge), it’s pretty clear what their priorities are.

Those of us that bought Halo:CE when it first came out loved the campaign, but even so called casual players like myself spent more time playing competitively against our friends either split-screen on a single Xbox or hooking a bunch together in a LAN. When Halo 2 moved all that to Xbox Live where your competition went beyond your neighborhood, the competitive community was born and there was no turning back.

Bungie was never a huge fan of online multiplayer and the competitive community had little influence. Bungie made the game available to MLG so they could tweak it any way they wanted, but for the most part you played Bungie’s game the way Bungie made it. That seemed to work for Bungie and about several million fans.

343i appears to have a different philosophy which seems to be that the competitive community must like this game, even though it appears that they still can’t figure out exactly what the competitive community really likes. It’s like they are giving them everything they think they want instead of giving them exactly what they want. In the process they have pissed off both communities. They seem to want to come up with solutions that are clearly their own and don’t want any credit to go to any community.

I’m not a competitive player and I don’t agree with everything they have to say, but they have many, many valid points. So does the casual community. Neither side has been listened to, so all we have left is to fight with each other. Most people that have come to this conclusion have simply left.

When your spouse insists they’re in love with someone else, all you can do is get a divorce and move on.

Don’t be mad at the competitive community. They want to save the game as much as you do. Your fight is not with them. It’s with 343i.

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> The past few month the compective community has been going hard on trying to make the game only playable for them selves and they are not caring about the other 50% of the community that is playing IS, BTB and so on.

:confused: that’s a pretty biased/over generalizing standpoint. In all honesty, while I do dislike Infinity slayer (and tend to voice it regularly… probably more than I should) I’ve never once asked that it or anything be removed.

I want nothing more than for the game to be fun for everyone, and at this point in time it really isn’t. Believe me, I don’t want you guys to feel like many others do now, and I doubt those people want you to have to deal with that either.

> They don’t want ricochet to be part of the v5 settings cause they think its only for casuals and it can’t be a good gametype. A few pros (ryannoob for a example)Has trashed the casual community for the passed few days (The round table discussion that he did). If it wasn’t for the casual community the compective community would of never been thought of during the first few halos.

Honestly, take pro players opinions with a grain of salt. Not only do their opinions vary (take Bravo [who is now a member of the 343i team] for example, he was one of the pro’s who pushed for Ordinance and whatnot for Throwdown so it would be somewhat more appealing to those used to Infinity settings) but many only take it from one perspective and one alone. They hardly represent the competitive crowd as a whole by any stretch of the imagination.

Now, in regards to Ricochet for V5, that’s one of the things that might get me to play Halo 4 again. I want to see what Ghostayame does for Competitive Richochet. I’ve a feeling it’ll involve strictly run-ins (no throwing goals) however, given that the thrown in goals have a relative strategy (goalies) it might be a better idea to keep them in (so that a team has to make decisions accordingly).

All in all, I’m very interested to see how Competitive Ricochet works out, and I think it’ll work pretty well.